Luke 15:2

EXCLUSIVENESS AND FORMALITY

‘The Pharisees and scribes murmured.’

Luke 15:2

The crowds which gathered about our Lord in the course of His mission were eminently representative of the various phases of Jewish life and thought. Of all types of society, that of the Pharisee is perhaps the most marked. We may recognise several distinct ideas associated with it.

I. Exclusiveness or spiritual pride.—If there is one great practical lesson, before all others, running through the teaching of Christ, and imparting a principle of radical change into the scheme of life, it is summed in these words, ‘The last shall be first and the first last.’ This doctrine is the first step in the organisation, so to say, of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the first in order of all those paradoxes which constitute the sum of Christianity. It was this which in the first centuries of its spread was such an outrage upon society at large, such an enigma to the dispassioned observer, and, as Gibbon has justly observed, was one great element of its triumph. The outcast was no longer an outcast. The despised and rejected of men has become the very pattern of the noblest life. And herein lay the essential antagonism to the spirit which possessed the Pharisee. Exclusion was his ideal. He clung to it as his heaven-conferred heritage. Christ broke down the walls of partition. The Kingdom of Heaven came, not to a favoured few, not to the elect or the predestinate, but to all.

II. Formalism.—Formalism may be explained as an exaggerated stress laid upon ceremonial, upon formularies and upon ordinances, as the elevation, in short, of the mechanism of life in comparison with the life itself. It is not to be supposed that all, or indeed the greater part of those in whom this tendency exists, are making an ostentatious display of righteousness, or are assuming a disguise to cloak their hidden propensities, nor yet that they are themselves conscious of the unsubstantial nature of the manifestations of their religious life. There are but few, I suppose, who do not at times succumb out of sheer weariness to the temptation to rest content with seeming instead of being, to substitute a mechanical goodness for genuineness of life, a conventional orthodoxy for the unquiet pursuit of reality. That there is a compatibility of genuine piety and the most narrow formalism, is a fact which meets us at every turn. But in proportion as knowledge becomes complete, as darkness melts into light, in such proportion are the means and outward expression of life lost sight of, swallowed up in the complete freedom of life itself. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life—life and liberty, unity of life beneath the multiplicity of forms. And in the recognition of this lies the Christian brotherhood, the veritable communion of saints. If we learn to recognise that this communion is a unity underlying the fragments of Christendom, we shall have been purged of the leaven of the Pharisee, we shall have been made meet to sit down with Christ in the company of publicans and sinners.

—Rev. Dr. C. H. O. Daniel.